Some interesting pictures - but be warned a bit shocking

[Suedan]

Just came across this site and personally found it interesting. Although I'm not sure whether its just trying to sell Natural Thyroid but it does make you wonder really.

Hope this link works:

google.com/search?hl=en&saf...

[LouiseRoberts]

Hi Sue

That is a link to a google search for pics of myxedema.

Is that what you meant to post..!?

Louise

x

[Suedan in reply to LouiseRoberts]

Hi Louise

Yes thats right, I found the before and after pics of thyroid sufferers on this site was interesting as they were being successfully treated with natural thyroid.

Sue x

[helvella Administrator in reply to Suedan]

Sue,

I don't think there is anything specific in the search about desiccated thyroid.

Certainly the apparent ages of some photographs strongly suggest they were taken pre-synthetic levothyroxine/liothyronine - so treatment would necessarily have been some form of thyroid/colloid/thyroid extract.

But really, the fact that people can suffer so horrifically is the message. And that comes across loud and clear.

[Suedan in reply to helvella]

I agree some of these pics do suggest pre-synthetic levo of an age but it does (to me anyway) show that the natural thyroid worked well and I've yet to see pics that show such a vast improvement with synthetic levo.

Or maybe its just me :/

Sue x

[greygoose in reply to Suedan]

But Sue, it isn't a site, it's photos from lots of different sites dragged up by the google search. Did you click specifically on one photo and look at that site?

Hugs, Grey

[Suedan in reply to greygoose]

ok

[Hidden]

Not to forget the lovely Marty Feldman (Graves disease sufferer) love him!

bbc.co.uk/comedy/people/mar...

inclined to put a pic up of me but just too scarey! J x

[Hidden in reply to Hidden]

And a recorded treatment of Myxoedema in Londonderry in the late 1800's with extract of sheep thyroid - there's loads of history and reported thyroid treatments before this, e.g. dried sponge.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl...

a history slideshow

slideshare.net/drtbalu/thyr...

the question is, although it is quite obvious to see and reported signs and symptoms very clear, why do they insist on going by newfangled, unreliable blood tests!

Jane x

[PR4NOW in reply to Hidden]

Jane, thanks for the two references, I hadn't come across them before. There are quite a few slideshows on the thyroid although they are pretty much the standard viewpoint. In the one you linked to in #17 he mistakenly gave Kendall credit for discovering T3 which is incorrect, it was T4 Kendall isolated. In #3 he says "Greeks used the term Bronchocele to explain the goitrous swelling. Thyroid gland was discovered 200 years before Greeks used this term.", but doesn't give a reference, I would love to know who he was referring to. Thanks again, lots of fun. PR

[helvella Administrator]

The paper Myxoedematous Madness by Richard Asher and published in 1949 has the advantage of having before and after photographs. It is also harrowing:

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl...

Rod

[vajra]

A bit of an aside, but i often think that the approach of medicine to hypothyroidism is heavily influenced by attitudes to scenarios like those in the pictures that were formed way back in the early days of thyroid replacement.

i.e. that the thinking is heavily coloured by the view that effective and acceptable treatment of hypothyroidism is limited to prevention/elimination of gross physical symptoms of the sort shown in the pictures.

That the expectation of most patients that they should feel normal and be returned to a previous state of wellness - that is get back to living a life unaffected by hypothyroidism is unreasonable and impractical.

You're still alive and look half normal??? What more do you want? What do you mean you're being asked to pay many many times the open market price of the medication???

Never mind that medical 'information' sources (infomercials?) aimed at the public the world over pass off the resolution of hypothyroidism as routine - in happy little throw away comments that suggest it's just a matter of popping this little pill daily with no mention of the complex, expensive and often highly unsatisfactory reality.

It's like in Alice in Wonderland - the cat is long gone, but the smile remains....

ian

[helvella Administrator in reply to vajra]

I think there is some truth in this. Many doctors have never seen one of the more extreme cases for, despite the bad treatment so many get, UK+I medicine does pick most people up before they reach these extremes. If these doctors rely on such pictures, it is understandable that the milder levels are dismissed.

It is, in my view, very important that Richard Asher writes about the psychological/mental issues. He at least was going beyond the images.

Rod